III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 111

misrepresentation sixty times over, but it is an agreement that certain means and limitations being prescribed, only that kind of truth is to be expected which is consistent with those means. For instance, if Sir Joshua Reynolds had been talking to a friend about the character of a face, and there had been nothing in the room but a deal table and an ink-bottle-and no pens-Sir Joshua would have dipped his finger in the ink, and painted a portrait on the table with

his finger, and a noble portrait too; certainly not delicate in outline, nor representing any of the qualities of the face dependent on rich outline, but getting as much of the face as in that manner was attainable. That is noble conventionalism, and Egyptian work on granite, or illuminator’s work in glass, is all conventional in the same sense, but not conventionally false. The two noblest and truest carved lions I have ever seen, are the two granite ones in the Egyptian room of the British Museum,¹ and yet in them,

¹ [For another reference to these lions, see Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 303).]

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